


sail your sea, meet your storm

by astahfrith



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Gen, Healing, Male-Female Friendship, Trauma, i love thinking about the friendship between these two, supporting each other as they heal from so much shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-08
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:09:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27946565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astahfrith/pseuds/astahfrith
Summary: “I want to go to the ocean,” Quynh says one morning, out of the blue.--Quynh wants to face her demons. Booker stands watch and witness.
Relationships: Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Quynh | Noriko
Comments: 14
Kudos: 95





	sail your sea, meet your storm

**Author's Note:**

> _you've got a journey to make  
>  there's your horizon to chase  
> so go far beyond where we stand  
> no matter the distance, I'm holding your hand_
> 
> _sail your sea, meet your storm  
>  all I want is to be your harbor  
> the light in me will guide you home  
> all I want is to be your harbor_
> 
> \- "harbor," vienna teng

“I want to go to the ocean,” Quynh says one morning, out of the blue. They had, until that moment, been eating breakfast in companionable silence. Then Quynh drops that bombshell, and Booker nearly chokes to death on his oatmeal. He wishes he could say he hasn’t _actually_ choked to death on oatmeal before, but alas. Thankfully, this time, he manages to recover. Quynh waits out his hacking and wheezing with more patience than he probably deserves.

When Book can breathe properly again, he looks up at her. She looks back, eyes dark, expression unfathomable. She doesn’t repeat herself; she knows he heard what she said. Now she waits for his response.

_I want to go to the ocean._

Fucking hell. Book and Quynh have been travelling and living together for almost twenty years, ever since she found him about a year into his exile. It took ten of those years for her to be able to bear even taking a shower, or standing in the rain. She hasn’t, as far as he knows, set foot within a hundred miles of an ocean in all that time. The few times Book went overseas, for one reason or another, Quynh only smiled and asked him to bring her some souvenirs, and that was that.

_I want to go to the ocean._

The words _are you sure?_ are on the tip of his tongue, but again Book looks at her face, those dark, guarded eyes, and swallows them down. She hadn’t asked him a question, hadn’t asked for his opinion or approval; she’d made a statement.

(The questions lurk beneath the surface. _I want to go to the ocean,_ Quynh said. _Will you come with me_? her eyes ask. _Will you stand watch for me while I face this demon_?)

There’s only one answer to be given. Book clears his throat. “Did you have a particular ocean in mind?” he asks. The flicker of relief in Quynh’s eyes is blink-and-you’ll-miss-it brief, like the quicksilver flash of a minnow in a sunlit stream, but Book has practice looking for these things.

“No,” she says, looking briefly down at her hands, folded on the table. And then, “After so long, I doubt there is an ocean out there where I will not find water that has drowned me before. Any will do.”

That statement hangs heavy in the silence between them. Book swallows hard.

“...well alright,” he says finally.

They’ve been in Canada the last few months, specifically Ottawa, which is definitely as close as they’ve come to any large body of water for an extended period of time in the last fifteen years. Maybe Book should’ve seen this coming. But he digresses. The point being, it won’t be that much of an effort to get to the ocean.

“I’ll find some cheap flights for us today,” Book says. “Unless you’d rather we drive,” he adds, after a moment. “Make a trip of it.”

“No, flying is fine,” Quynh says, and again Book hears what she doesn’t say: that if she gives herself too long to think about it, sitting in a car, watching the horizon approach, she will lose her resolve, and perhaps never regain it. “Thank you,” she adds, and then returns to eating her own breakfast like the conversation never happened at all.

Only her knuckles, white around her spoon, betray her. Book doesn’t say a word, doesn’t call attention to it, but beneath the table, he presses a knee against hers.

The smile she grants him is another quicksilver minnow, but there nonetheless. He’ll take it.

* * *

It’s an empty stretch of the Newfoundland coast Book leads them to in the end. They left the rest of humanity behind several miles ago along with their rental car, parked in a lot belonging to one of the strips of beach that’s _actually_ popular with tourists in the summer. They set out at the crack of dawn, though, so there was no one around to see them slip away into the trees at the edge of the lot, headed north, and no one to be seen since.

Book keeps them far back from the water as they hike, far enough that it’s present only as a soft susurration of sound at the edge of hearing that he uses to make sure they don’t get lost. There’s a faint tang of salt in the air, and the barest sense of unnatural - or natural, depending on how you look at it - emptiness towards the east. Quynh, for her part, wears a face mask and her giant soundproof headphones, blocking everything out until she’s ready to face it. The two of them don’t speak on the hike. Book doesn’t mind.

Eventually, Book pauses to check his map. He hears Quynh stop behind him but only hums in contemplation, squinting at the lines printed on the paper - he hadn’t trusted his phone to last with regards to battery or signal, as far out as he was leading them. Better to do it the old fashioned way. After another few seconds of squinting, he nods to himself and then turns to look at Quynh. She only hesitates a little to meet his gaze.

He tilts his head towards the east, asking the question without asking. It takes Quynh long enough to respond that he wonders if they’re going to end up turning back after all. But then she nods, barely perceptible.

Book again doesn’t ask if she’s sure. He only nods back and then turns east and starts leading them in the direction of that whisper of sound. After a pause, he hears Quynh’s footsteps following him.

The whisper gets louder as they walk, the taste of salt in the air stronger. The scrub beneath their feet gives way to longer grasses growing out of gray sand. Book can’t help but glance back a few times, to see if Quynh is still following him. She always is, though her gaze is fixed on his feet and her shoulders keep hunching further and further in, like she’s walking into a rising gale.

Finally, they crest a small hill, and the Labrador Sea yawns before them, a line of slate stretching across the horizon.

Book stops, and hears Quynh stumble to a halt behind him. He turns around to look at her. Her gaze is still fixed on the ground: she clearly only stopped because he did. Her hands are twisted in the hem of her shirt, shoulders around her ears. Book says nothing. Eventually, slowly, she looks up, gaze fixed firmly on him and not anything behind him. Her eyes are wide, pupils dilated in clear stress, breathing shallow. For a second, Book considers calling this whole thing off, turning her around and leading her back the way they came.

But that’s not his call to make. So Book holds her eyes and waits. And finally, what feels like an age later, she nods, another barest inclination of her head.

Book nods back, and then steps aside, and at last there is nothing between Quynh and the ocean but fifty meters of sand and four centuries of memory. She goes still. If she’s still breathing, it’s lost in the wind and the surf. Book spends only a moment longer watching her, then turns and hikes down the rise to the actual beach, as much as the thin strip of pebbles and sand can be called a beach. Everything about it is gray, from said pebbles and sand to the sky and the Atlantic itself, breaking into foam on the shore.

Book finds a convenient boulder a little ways off to the left and sets down his pack of water and other supplies. He shrugs out of the flannel he wore for warmth in the early morning hours and which he has now sweated through, leaving him in just a tshirt.

He digs a bottle of water out of his pack and uncaps it, then leans against the boulder as he takes a long swig and turns his gaze to the horizon. It doesn’t look like it’s going to storm, despite the dreariness of the sky, but he’s no weatherman. He brought an umbrella just in case. Absently he plucks at the front of his shirt, unsticking it from his skin where he can feel his sweat cooling.

Book doesn’t look back at the hill. It’s up to Quynh to make her choice now, free from any perceived judgments or expectations on his part. Truly, if she decided to turn back now, he wouldn’t blame her. Wouldn’t judge her. That she made it this far; that she even _considered_ this—

Book wishes he had even a hundredth of her courage. But then, he’s wished for a lot of things over the years. Not many have come true.

He shakes his head to chase that train of thought away. This isn’t about him. This is about Quynh. His job is to be here, in this moment, and nowhere and no _when_ else.

He sighs and decides to sit down on the boulder. He leans back on one hand and takes another swig of water, listening to the waves, keeping an eye out for movement in his peripheral vision.

It takes nearly an hour. No time at all, really, for people like them. Book doesn’t care; he’ll wait as long as it takes for her to get what she came here for or to give up. He finishes his bottle of water and starts another, digs out a granola bar when his stomach starts to snarl at him. Closer to the water, a cluster of seagulls is rooting around in the sand, clearly looking for their breakfast too.

Finally, just when the crash of the waves has started to lull him into something like a doze, Book spies a flicker of movement in the corner of his eye. He’s fully awake again in under a second, but makes no outward sign of having noticed anything until he hears the crunch of another pair of feet on the pebbles. Only then does he turn his head.

Quynh stands there at the bottom of the hill, still as stone. Her hair whips around her face in the wind, even in a ponytail as it is, but she doesn’t seem to notice, eyes fixed on the water. As Book watches, she slowly reaches up and pulls her mask down, then pushes her headphones back to hang at her shoulders.

Book sees her chest swell as she takes a deep breath—and then doubles over, one hand clapped to her mouth and the other wrapped around her stomach as she fights down what is probably nausea at the unfiltered smell of the salt. The she doesn’t actually vomit in the end Book is pretty sure is down to her having nothing in her stomach to lose. She’d only managed a single bite of a granola bar before they set out.

In time she straightens, arms falling to her sides again. He watches her take a breath, and then another. She has a way of breathing that makes every breath seem like it’s a surprise.

Eventually he sees her hands curl into fists. Book finds himself holding his breath. It takes another long, long moment, but then, back straight, spine rigid, Quynh steps forward. One step, two steps, three steps, stiff and deliberate, until the next breaking wave laps at her feet and she falters, but only for a second and then she’s moving forward again. She doesn’t stop until the water is nearly at her knees. She breathes in one more time, deep enough that Book can again see the way her chest swells and spine bends even from where he is—

—and then she screams. The sound is sudden enough that Book nearly tumbles off his rock in shock. He spies a cluster of gulls wheeling into the sky further down the beach as he regains his balance. They’re probably screaming in annoyance, but he can’t tell: Quynh’s voice overwhelms everything.

Book has heard Quyhn scream in various ways over the years they’ve spent together. Fury; terror; grief; pain.

Never, ever, has he heard her scream like this. It echoes down the beach, impossibly loud, impossibly raw; full of cracking notes and harmonics Book didn't know the human voice was capable of. It’s primal in a way that sends a wracking shudder down his spine; something dredged up from the drowning depths that had been Quynh’s tomb for so long. It’s the scream she was screaming every time he and the others dreamed of her, he knows; the scream that was stolen from her with every life and death beneath the waves, finally given sound and fury. All Book can do is listen, aching.

Quynh screams until she has no air left, then gulps in another breath and keeps screaming. It never seems to get weaker, and Book realizes her throat is healing as fast as she can scream herself hoarse. Eventually she manages to overwhelm even that, and finally her voice gives out, the only sound escaping her a whistling rasp that is quickly lost in the roar of the surf.

Only then does she close her mouth and collapse to her knees in the water, arms wrapped around her chest and eyes on the horizon.

Only then does Book stand and go to her.

If Quynh hears the slosh of his approach, she gives no sign. When he comes up beside her, he can see her eyes are distant, looking at something far away from here. There is silence between them for a long moment.

Book hesitates, and finally holds out a hand, making sure it’s in Quynh’s line of vision. It takes her a while to focus on it. She stares at it, then lifts her gaze to stare at him. Instead of a roiling storm of emotions, her eyes are empty, still like the ocean on a clear and windless night. The look unnerves him more than he cares to admit, but Book doesn’t look away.

Finally, Quynh lifts her hand and places it in his. Book folds his around it, almost tight enough to bruise, and gently pulls her to her feet. She lets herself be pulled. Her clothes are soaked but she doesn’t seem to care. Book waits, still holding her hand, as she looks out at that distant horizon one more time. He still doesn’t know what she’s looking at, but he can hear her breathing, and every breath is slow and steady. Beneath his hand, she does not shake.

When Quynh finally turns her back, Book turns with her, and lets her lead him back to shore.

**Author's Note:**

> yeah so I watched The Old Guard earlier this year, had a lot of feelings, read a bunch of fanfic, had a lot more feelings about Booker and Quynh, wrote most of this in a burst, let it languish for a few months, and finally finished it off today. hope it was enjoyable and gave you as many emotions as it gave me to write.


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